Look, in neoliberalism the ruling elite understand something.

The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world.

Think of the question of mass incarceration. Think of the coding that the Republican Party has used for years, whether they're talking about Obama or blacks or Willie Horton.

Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.

Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

It is precisely through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open.

Under neoliberalism, culture appears to have largely abandoned its role as a site of critique.

Whereas purpose provides the juice and the direction, principles define the parameters of action and the criteria for excellence of behavior.

We'll start to forget a place once we left it

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

A successful career has been full of blunders.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

... [ellipsis in source] it is true that the world was made in six days, but it was by God, to whose power the infirmity of men isnot to be compared.

Everybody wants clean, safe energy. Some people think nuclear is the way to go. Some people think coal is the way to go. Some people think wind is the way to go. And there's always balances on that.

I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.

Let us go singing as far as we go: the road will be less tedious.